"It's Better to be Bad than Stupid": An Exploratory Study on Resistance and Denial of Special Education Discourses in the Narratives of Street Youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation study examined and gave voice to the experiences of a group of street involved youth, those who had received special education support and services during their school years. They are not spoken about in the literature. Special education is complex, diverse, and encompasses many exceptional pupils for whom services and supports are provided in the school system. Many street youth belong to this group with exceptionalities such as learning disability, mild intellectual disability or behaviour. Using narrative analysis and structuration theory frameworks, the life history narratives of fifteen street youth who were in special education classes were co-constructed and analysed. In addition, a survey question gathered how many new in-takes at a drop-in for street youth self-identify as youth who were in special education. Furthermore, data was gathered from service providers in education and social services through semi-structured interviews and two focus groups. Youth participants considered citizenship in special education as exclusionary and actively resisted it because of the social connotations such as ‘being stupid’ which were attached to it. Youth emphasized that teachers and support staff seemed unaware of the complex environmental factors that impacted on their ability to be successful in school. They reported that once they were formally identified and placed in special education, they were put in a holding pattern that often did not lead to graduation. Special education was focused on classifications according to deficit discourses rather than engaging these students in learning or in having their identified learning needs met. Although study participants dropped out of school a number of times, they kept returning either to complete secondary school or enroll in college, mostly without special education designation and supports. Service providers, educators and special services staff should mentor such youth, provide opportunities for addressing learning problems, and deliver quality instruction for students with identified learning difficulties and needs. There is a dearth of alternative and transitional post-secondary programs to meet the specific needs of these students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".